Circa Theatre Needlessly Reimagines Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit

Thursday, 20 March 2025, 5:10 am
Opinion: Howard Davis

Described by the author as "an improbable farce in three acts,” Noël Coward’s famous play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites an eccentric psychic to hold a séance at his house, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he’s subsequently haunted by the ghost of his wilful and temperamental first wife, who makes continual attempts to disrupt his marriage to his second wife, who can neither see nor hear the ghost.

Coward took the play’s title from a line in Shelley’s poem To A Skylark - “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert.” He had been considering a comedy about ghosts for some time and his first thoughts centered on an old house in Paris, haunted by spectres from different centuries, with the comedy arising from their conflicting attitudes, but he could not get the plot to work. He knew that in wartime Britain, with death a constant presence, there would be some objection to a comedy about ghosts, but his firm view was that as the story would be thoroughly heartless - “You can't sympathise with any of them. If there was a heart it would be a sad story."

After his London office and flat had been destroyed in the Blitz, Coward took a short holiday with the actress Joyce Carey at Portmeirion on the coast of Snowdonia in Wales. She was writing a play about Keats and he was still thinking about his ghostly light comedy. He later recounted - “We sat on the beach with our backs against the sea wall and discussed my idea exclusively for several hours. Keats, I regret to say, was not referred to. By lunchtime the title had emerged together with the names of the characters, and a rough, very rough, outline of the plot. At seven-thirty the next morning I sat, with the usual nervous palpitations, at my typewriter. ... I fixed the paper into the machine and started. Blithe Spirit. A Light Comedy in Three Acts. For six days I worked from eight to one each morning and from two to seven each afternoon. On Friday evening, May ninth, the play was finished and, disdaining archness and false modesty, I will admit that I knew it was witty, I knew it was well constructed, and I also knew that it would be a success.”

Blithe Spirit was first produced at the Manchester Opera House in June 1941, then premiered in the West End the following month. Its London production (1,997 performances at three theatres) was directed by Coward and set a record for non-musical plays in the West End that wasn’t surpassed until 1957 by The Mousetrap. The Manchester Guardian found the mixture of farce and impending tragedy "An odd mixture and not untouched by genius of a sort,” while The Observer commented on the skill with which Coward treated his potentially difficult subject, ending with ”here is a new play, a gay play … as rapt a servant of the séance as ever had spirits on tap.”

The Guardian’s theatre critic wrote, "London received Mr Noel Coward's ghoulish farce with loud, though not quite unanimous acclaim. The Times considered the piece the equal not only of Coward's earlier success Hay Fever, but also of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. There were some dissenting views, however, with James Agate considering the play "common” and Graham Greene describing it as "a weary exhibition of bad taste.” Nonetheless, the play did well on Broadway later in the year, running for 657 performances. It was filmed in 1945 and another, less successful, movie version followed in 2020. Coward himself directed a musical adaptation called High Spirits, which launched on Broadway and in the West End in 1964. Radio and television presentations of the play have been repeatedly broadcast in Britain and the US ever since.

When the play had its first West End revival in 1970 it was warmly, though not rapturously praised. By the time of the next major production, in 1976, Irving Wardle pronounced it "Stylistically … Coward's masterpiece: his most complete success in imposing his own view of things on the brute facts of existence" and Michael Billington in The Guardian wrote of Coward's influence on Harold Pinter. Coward's partner, Graham Payn, commented to Peter Hall that Coward would have loved the production (which was directed by Pinter) "because at last the play was centered on the marriage between Charles and Ruth; Elvira and ... Madame Arcati were incidentals".

After a Broadway revival in 1987, Newsweek amplified the connection between Coward and such playwrights as Pinter and Joe Orton. In 2004, Charles Spencer wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "With Hay Fever and Private Lives, Blithe Spirit strikes me as being one of Coward's three indisputable comic masterpieces. [It’s] the outrageous frivolity with which Coward treats mortality that makes the piece so bracing."

Coward can hardly be classified as a “serious” playwright and Circa’s latest production is certainly a light, amusing, and frothy affair, but like a mistimed soufflé it eventually falls rather flat. Nevertheless, on opening night, the ensemble cast clearly enjoyed themselves almost as much as the audience, with stage and screen veteran Ginette McDonald in particular rising to the underwhelming occasion.

In a pre-emptively defensive article for The Post, director Colin McColl said, “Because I was so keen to see if Noël Coward plays still work without the tuxedos and long cigarette holders, our production of Blithe Spirit is set in no specific period - apart from some vaguely 1970s elements. But it’s not about when or where; it’s about relationships. In recent years, Coward’s significance (particularly as a queer writer) has been re-appraised - and the coded expressions of the possibilities of same-sex love in his well known work can now be dealt with more frankly in contemporary productions such as ours.” McColl has made one significant casting change to achieve this end which unfortunately does nothing to enhance the original text, besides providing the opportunity for a few titters prompted by plays on such outmoded vocabulary as ‘queer’ and ‘pouf.’

An even more embarrassing shame is that a similar approach to ‘modernisation’ has been applied to Circa Theatre’s north-facing façade. The classically proportioned and elaborately detailed brick masonry facades of the former Westport Coal Company building (once New Zealand’s largest coal producer and supplier) were moved to Wellington’s waterfront in 1994. What little remained of the original Edwardian Penty and Lawrence-designed structure has now been radically disfigured by Sebastian Bernhardt’s tasteless renovations, incorporating a tacky pink restaurant (dubbed ‘Chou Chou’) and an art installation (or ‘Velarium’) by Kayne Horsham of Kaynemaile. The light-weight, bio-based architectural fabric, supposedly inspired by the chainmail armour of the equally awful Lord of the Rings franchise, may be hard-wearing, but is undeniably hideous.

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Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz